Babette's Feast

Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film of 1987, this quiet Danish film seemed an unlikely candidate for international success; instead of sex, violence, or nudity, it offers sermons and hymns, a dozen or so elderly Danes, and a feast to end all feasts. An expository flashback opens the film, delving into the frustrated love lives of Hastrup and Stensgaard, the daughters of a prophetic minister in a small town on Denmark's rugged Jutland peninsula. The story then shifts to 1871, as the title character (Audran), whose husband and son were killed by the Paris Communards, arrives from France and enters the employ of the sisters, who are carrying on their no...